If you’re looking for a tiny motherboard for a micro- or home theater PC, you can rarely go wrong with a VIA, but their new VIA EITX-3001 is particularly interesting not just for its diminutive size, bot for its ability to decode full 1080p content.

Based around the Em-ITX standard, the EITX-3001 has an integrated 1.3GHz VIA Nano E-Series processor and VIA VX855 media system processor, and can be used to output 1080p high-def video to any source capable of utilizing its HDMI connection, with full support for hardware decoding of PPEG-2, H.264 and WMV9 content.

As far as ports are concerned, the VIA EITX-3001 supports VGA, gigabit ethernet, dual COM ports, for USB ports, a USB device port and the usual audio and microphone jacks. The EITX-3001 even comes with a USB touchscreen driver onboard, in case you want to turn this into a multitouch machine.

According to VIA, the EITX-3001 is really meant for kiosks and embedded devices, but there’s definitely enough oomph here to make it an intriguing possibility to users putting together their own cheap 1080p HTPC machine.